Speak Easy (Speak Easy 1)

It sure as hell was. Dirty and dangerous and full of constant temptation.

As I remembered his fingers beneath my dress, on my bare skin, touching the most sensitive parts of me, my body thrummed with desire. I flexed and fisted my hands in the sheet, imagining what his body was like underneath those custom suits. Suddenly I had all kinds of ideas for getting him to talk.

He said he found me hard to resist. I was going to test him on that.

#

“I might be able to help you,” Rosie said coyly, leaning toward her reflection as she applied her lipstick. With her social life, I thought she might know some people interested in buying whisky, so I’d stopped by hoping to see her before she left for work. She met my eyes in the bedroom mirror. “But what’s in it for me?”

I couldn’t offer her cash—I needed every dollar to pay Angel. But there was something I thought she’d go for. “How’d you like to go to Club 23 tonight?”

She straightened. “You serious?”

“Yes.”

She capped her lipstick and rubbed her ruby lips together. “Why do you need the money so bad?”

“My father’s in trouble. I’m helping him cover a debt, and I have to pay it immediately.” I’d decided to be up front with Rosie because she liked Daddy. Mr. LaChance had an eye for other women and a tendency to disappear for weeks at a time, and more than once Daddy had helped Mrs. LaChance pay the rent.

Rosie nodded. “What’s the price?”

“Fifteen per bottle.”

She admired her reflection again. “Club 23, huh? I bet there’s a lot of high class daddies in there.” In the mirror, her eyes wandered around the room she shared with Evelyn. “Maybe I could get out of this dump.”

“So it’s a deal?”

“It’s a deal.” She went to the closet and pulled down a brown leather suitcase. “Pack as many bottles as you can in here, and I’ll take ‘em down to the store. I know a few suits I can sweet talk.”

I ran out to my car and hustled in one sack of whisky. We managed to tuck all twelve bottles inside the case. “I bet I’ll have it all sold before lunch,” she bragged, flipping the latches closed.

“If you do, I’ll buy your first drink at the club.”

She pursed her perfect bow lips as she slipped into her shoes. “Honey, once we’re through that door, you can go chase yourself. I won’t need you.”

#

/> That day, I called or visited every customer on our list. I braved sales calls to restaurants where I knew the owners and even ventured into the Country Club to speak with a waiter I’d gone to high school with. Short of standing on a street corner and shouting to the world that I had whisky for sale, I’d done everything possible to move every last drop, but at five o’clock I still had forty unsold bottles. That meant I’d be six hundred dollars short when I faced Angel tonight, and that was assuming Rosie managed to sell all twelve bottles she’d taken to work.

I drove home, racking my brain. Who could I borrow from? Bridget was out—I was avoiding even talking to her because I felt so guilty about lying. And she was bound to start asking questions about Daddy’s absence. He’d never left us this long.

We had no other close family. Evelyn didn’t make much at the bakery, and Rosie was already doing me a favor.

That left Joey. Again.

Inside the house, I stared at the phone in the front hall, tugging at my hair. I hated to ask Joey for anything more since he’d given me over five hundred bucks yesterday. But I had nowhere else to turn, and Daddy was depending on me. My sisters were depending on me, even if they didn’t know it. I looked up his mother’s number in the directory and dialed, but she said she hadn’t seen him all day and didn’t expect him back any time soon. Normally I laughed when I heard anyone refer to him as Giuseppe, but not today. After thanking her, I hung up and yanked on my hair again. “Shit!”

I paced back and forth in the hall, utterly panicked. I had no idea where Joey was. I still hadn’t heard from Rosie. I hadn’t seen my sisters all day and God only knew what they were up to. My father was being held in some gang hideout somewhere, maybe being tortured or beaten, and I was short six hundred bucks on the ransom payment due at the end of the day. And that was only half the cash I needed to free him! My nerves were so raw that when the phone rang, I shrieked before grabbing it.

“Hello?”

“Heya, Frances,” Rosie said. “The deed’s done.”

I held my breath. “It is?”

“No foolin. I got the cash right here.”

“And you got the price I asked for?”